Joan Bennett: Love is a Crime

Love Is a Crime," Vanity Fair's 10-episode podcast about Joan Bennett and film producer Walter Wanger, begins Tuesday, August 17, hosted by Vanessa Hope (the granddaughter of Joan Bennet and Walter Wanger) and Karina Longworth. I'll be sharing my memories of Joan in Episode 9.

The voice cast ensemble includes Zooey Deschanel as Joan, Jon Hamm as Walter, Griffin Dunne as agent Jennings Lang, Mara Wilson as Joan’s older movie-star sister, Constance, and Adam Mortimer as Joan’s turbulent father, Richard.

Joan Bennett, leading lady of Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window, was a famous femme fatale in 1940s film noir. The most salacious story she ever starred in, however, happened off-screen. Enter her film-producer husband, Walter Wanger, whose jealousy and rage over Bennett’s affair with an agent would lead to one of Old Hollywood’s wildest scandals.

Vanity Fair introduces Love Is a Crime, a 10-episode podcast series coproduced by V.F. and Cadence13. You Must Remember This podcast creator Karina Longworth and filmmaker Vanessa Hope—the granddaughter of Bennett and Wanger—will lead listeners through a journey to unpack just how Wanger and Bennett “ended up staring at each other over another man’s bloody body in December 1951.”

Questions abound in the series, which examines both the lead-up to Walter and Joan’s fateful 1951 encounter and its misogynistic aftermath. “Why would my grandfather, a successful movie producer, a liberal thinker, a man who helped Jewish émigrés escape Hitler, take a gun to confront his wife?” Hope asks in a preview of the podcast. “Why would my grandmother, a beautiful movie star who had all but invented the archetype of the film noir femme fatale, and was then starring in a hit franchise of family films, risk everything to sneak around with her agent?